Food - All That's Wrong With Global Wine Is in This Bottle: Review

Review by John Mariani

On first sniff I thought the wine was a little corked. Yet after a few swirls, that was evidently not the problem. With the first sip of 2003 Andeluna Grand Reserve Pasionado ($40-$65), a Bordeaux blend made in Mendoza, Argentina, the problem revealed itself in an explosion of high-alcohol, grapey, oaky flavors that seemed to epitomize all that is wrong with what has been called the globalization of wine.

Here was a wine that was technically unflawed -- clean, smooth and bright. The bottle lingo, by winemaker Silvio Alberto, reads, ``Full bodied and complex, it exhibits aromas of ripe red fruits and spices with flavors of red fruit, spice, and anise and notes of vanilla and chocolate that complement the rounded tannins.''

The repetition of the words ``red fruit'' and ``spice'' in one sentence should tell you something: This is winespeak, hitting all the Pavlovian notes used to describe thousands of modern red wines around the world, from Argentina to Croatia, seeking to cash in on the global taste for big, alcoholic reds.

Andeluna was founded in 2003 by Dallas investor H. Ward Lay, of Lay Capital Group (his father, Herman W. Lay, founded Frito- Lay). The younger Lay lives much of the year on his 200,000-acre cattle ranch in Patagonia.

The Andeluna Pasionado bottle, which sports a sticker from Decanter magazine awarding a gold medal to the wine, also extols the consultant Michel Rolland, a controversial figure in the wine world who often has advocated pumping up red wines by delaying picking the grapes until extremely ripe. He also sometimes recommends using a process called micro-oxygenation, by which small bubbles of oxygen are added to wines to make them rounder, allowing them to age faster in stainless-steel tanks to achieve the slower, natural oxidation that oak barrels provide.

Andeluna's importer, San Francisco Wine Exchange, says micro-oxygenation is not used for the wine.

Mature at 5

But the way Andeluna is made is telling: For a five-year-old wine blended from 35 percent cabernet sauvignon, 35 percent merlot, 20 percent malbec and 10 percent cabernet franc, it is very mature, the tannins very soft. The real problem is that it tastes like a hundred other wines of its kind -- the global taste you find when a very new, very well endowed winery lacks the tradition to know just what their vineyards may be capable of expressing.

Had I tasted Andeluna Pasionado blind, I would no more guess that it was from Mendoza than I might think it came from Mendocino County, California, or Valencia, Spain, or Ragusa, Sicily.

Designed for Awards

This is a wine designed to win awards, the kind of cabernet that California cult wine faddists say will ``blow your doors off.'' It tastes more of the lab than of the individual vineyard, like prune juice more than good wine, so cloying in its fruit, so lacking in a fine edge of acid, that my wife and I left half the bottle undrunk while having a simple dinner of grilled pork chops and white beans.

The fact that the label noted a minimum alcohol volume of 14.7 percent also made this something of an ordeal to finish. This is not outrageously high for a cabernet blend, though it is symptomatic of the levels achieved where the wine tastes ``hot'' and the nose is full of alcohol.

Andeluna Pasionado is not a poorly made wine -- in fact, it's a very carefully made wine -- but it is not the kind of wine that expresses the best coming out of Argentina's Mendoza Valley, where malbec has shown the most distinction as a varietal. It is too big, too rich and too alcoholic. It lacks both dimension and the character of terroir.

There is a lot wrong with a world of wine where attempts are made to have every varietal taste more or less the same and where hugeness and over-ripeness are seen as a virtue as much as they are a marketing strategy.

(John Mariani writes on wine for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on this column: John Mariani at john@johnmariani.com.